Oct 4 1959

From The Space Library

NASA LITTLE JOE launch vehicle carrying a boilerplate Mercury capsule with a dummy escape system successfully launched from Wallops Station, Va.

LUNIK III, Russia's translunar earth satellite began its photographing trip around the moon, while Premier Khrushchev was visiting Peiping.

The Soviet Union launched Lunik III toward the moon on the second anniversary of Sputnik I. The spacecraft, called an "Automatic Interplanetary Station," carried 345 pounds of instruments including cameras. On October 7, a signal from earth activated the cameras, which photographed about 70 percent of the hidden side of the moon in 40 minutes. The photographs were transmitted to Soviet stations on October 18 and released to the world press on October 27. First analyses of the photographs by Soviet astronomers seemed to indicate that the hidden side of the lunar surface had fewer craters than its visible face.

New York Times, October 27, 1959; Instruments and Spacecraft, pp. 69-71.